WARNING: SPOILERS ahead for Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story is partly good, mostly ineffective, and overall a complete letdown. Its ambition certainly ends up being its downfall, resulting in a hodgepodge of Ed Gein’s somewhat true-crime story, but also the source of inspiration for three iconic horror movies.
While this may all sound intriguing, especially given how disturbingly fascinating the infamous Gein was, Monster season 3 fails to capitalize on the source material. After a drudge of a premiere episode, the series becomes entirely unhinged, borderline sadistic, and concerningly unfocused.
Creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are known, and have been criticized, for adding fictional elements to historical accounts for the sake of dramatic flair. Herein lies the most egregious problem with Monster season 3 – these overly-dramatized, often grotesque creative liberties are neither educational nor entertaining. They all just contribute to utter nonsense and a mess of a miniseries.
Monster: Ed Gein Is Hardly About The Killer In Focus At All
For a series called The Ed Gein Story, there’s a confusing amount of spotlight changes that take viewers away from the main subject. They’re all related to Gein’s “legacy”, which is oddly how the series seems to portray it, especially the fun but unnecessary portrayals of Hitchcock making Psycho and Tobe Hooper making The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Both referenced the mythical Gein as inspirations for those classic horrors, and Monster really wants you to be aware of that to the point where it may as well ask you to applaud Ed for his contribution to cinema.
Saying that Monster season 3 is about “the man, the myth, and the legend” would be pretty accurate if there weren’t so many inaccuracies and falsehoods about the actual character. Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam is completely unrecognizable in the role and does a fine job of creeping the hell out of us. Some images in Monster season 3 are jaw-dropping and unforgettable, which has much to do with how convincingly freaky Hunnam makes his Gein, even though his physicality isn’t quite right for the part.
It’s deeply puzzling that a show that comes off with such an informative tone can be so off the rails and frustratingly fictionalized. This story is stretched well beyond how it arguably should have been told. Eight episodes, all over 50 minutes each, is frankly ridiculous for what we’re dealing with. This would have been a sharp two-hour movie at best, especially if it had stuck to the facts. The relentless revisions to reality make Monsters season 3 feel like a history book scribbled in crayon.
Themes about Ed Gein as a cross-dresser and schizophrenic come off as misguided attempts to sympathize with the twisted character. After you see Gein dance around in a woman’s skin, among other things, there’s nothing you can do to win back an audience. Is the show trying to evoke the idea that Ed was a victim of his religiously crazed mother, repressed psycho-sexuality, Nazi propaganda, and polite society? These aspects try to clarify, even rationalize, Ed’s behaviors, but actually make him more of an enigma because there truly is no explanation for how he came to be.
Monster Season 3 Is So Narratively Thin It Literally Ripped Off Another Netflix Show
The finale episode is so ridiculous that I genuinely can’t believe it’s real. Fans have been calling for a new season of Mindhunter for years, and instead of making that happen, Netflix allows it to be essentially spoofed on one of its biggest horror franchise shows. They must have figured that giving fans something like Mindhunter would be just as good as the real thing. (It’s not.)
Watching three new actors portray the Mindhunter protagonists should only be done in a Saturday Night Live skit, but that is beside the real reasons why The Ed Gein Story is downright bad. Besides being unbelievably long, monotonously paced, wildly unfocused, historically inaccurate, tonally bizarre, thematically ambiguous, concerningly perverse, and strangely sympathetic, its biggest sin is how it could take one of the most fascinating serial killers who ever lived and make his story so painfully tedious.
Every television show is designed to inspire specific and intentional responses in viewers, be it laughter, sadness, or fear. Monster: The Ed Gein Story remarkably only elicits unpleasant feelings over its torturous season – boredom, frustration, shock, confusion, and disgust. This isn’t just a completely botched series; it’s senseless, perverse, and exists outside the realm of narrative entertainment because there’s absolutely no one to root for and nothing for viewers to walk away with.